Thursday, 5 December 2013

Nostalgia

Melancholic have I been of late, thoughtful even, not bad,
neither sad, but the consequence of the dark nights that now seem to fall
directly after lunch, while the need for words remains as urgent as ever (I
wanted to write the world. What went wrong?). And in this space, thoughts turn
lathe-like onto other thoughts, most notably on the blurry cloud of
beer-inclined speculation that exists out there in the ether — and one thought
keeps returning to me with the regularity of a healthy heartbeat, that there
currently exists a feverish nostalgia for yesteryear in beer and brewing. Next
year’s most eagerly awaited beer book will cover the history of British beer
from the 1960s; one of the most respected beer blogs is a mass of facts and
figures from the last two centuries of British brewing, while another equally
compelling blog corrects the myths and ghost stories that have plagued beer
history for decades; meanwhile retro beer labels have appeared on bottles and
cans from an assortment of family and global brewers and recipes from the past
are dug out, dusted down and presented to the contemporary drinker. Beer
festivals are not free from this strange yearning for the past — some of the
most acclaimed ones have called home spaces that once represented a long vanished
municipal pride. Perhaps hipsterism, the sickly runt of postmodernism, is also
part of this nostalgia.

So is this nostalgia a bad thing? Not really. Beer is
nostalgia: things ain’t what they were; you used to get a good pint in here
(sometimes with the phrase once upon a time added, which imbues the statement
with the quality of a fairy tale); it doesn’t taste like it used to (maybe
nothing tastes like it used to); in my day (which suggests that every day is an
endless collection of many days; there is no such thing as a day — Borges
posited that there had only been one man throughout history in a poem whose
name eludes me at the moment). The beer that sits eager and anticipatory in the
glass has the ability to take us back in our own personal time; bugger the
biscuit that Marcel Proust nibbled on and led him to spending years in bed
writing A la recherche du temps perdu, a glass of beer has the power to take the
drinker back time and time again, whether it’s to a pub, meal, meeting,
sporting moment or even just a moment of discovery. This is beer’s strength but
it is also the way that it cannot escape from nostalgia. Mind you, the future
is overrated, while being modern means nothing. I’ve seen breweries use phrases
along the lines of ‘Modern beer for modern people’, which is as meaningless as
pubs that have ‘bar & kitchen’ attached to their name; though no one has
yet used something like ‘yesteryear’s beer for people living in the past’. I
wonder why.

This is inspired by an essay I am working on at the moment that looks at memory and beer hence its rather inchoate nature

I think there's quite a lot going on when it comes to any product using nostalgia or the past. In the book's cases, you've got the feeling that there's still a lot to learn about past event's ; be that a new angle on an old, well-worn tale, or in the case of Zythophile, technical information that might help you personally understand a brewery, style or beer. In terms of marketing, the nostalgia ticket appeals to both young and old - that's why it's so powerful. The young use it to validate what they are doing now; an attempt to tie in with something that has the one thing that they don't - a history. Couple an event like IndyMan (new beer) with a historically-important building (Victoria baths), and you've got a perfect storm; history, newness, and a sense of social pride in using the space. The older generation have a powerful, emotional link to the brand, beer or - in fact - anything, that reminds them of the 'good ol' days' and immediately makes them feel included. It's not just beer - the food industry does this on a much, much larger scale.

Time present and time past

I’m a journalist and writer who happens to have beer and pubs as one of my specialist subjects (I also write about travel, food and the countryside). I love pubs and bars wherever they are around the world, the very best exemplify the words public house, a home from home — and I adore good beer whether it’s served on the Suffolk coast, hidden away in the Northern French countryside or something dark and mysterious in the depths of the Polish hinterland. You can read my journalism elsewhere or somehow pick up a copy of the much-underrated Big Book of Beer; or perhaps you are ploughing through 1001 Beers You Must Try Before You Die, where I have edited the work of over 40 of the world’s foremost authorities on beer, or travelling the UK with a copy of Great British Pubs to hand. I also do beer tasting events. This blog though is an attempt to loosen up the boundaries of what constitutes beer writing, have some fun, experiment, whatever. It might not work, I might get bored with it, I might get writer’s block and end up picking sprouts in an East Anglian field, but hey, whatever.